Past Climate variability, Ice cores, Tree rings

Take away ideas and understandings

• Understand how oxygen isotopes in seawater are used to reconstruct past changes in glacial ice volume.

• Understand how past changes in the Earth's orbit cause changes in the seasonal distribution of solar radiation, and how they have been the "pacemaker" for glacial-interglacial climate variations.

• Understand the kinds of paleoclimate data extracted from the Vostok (Antarctic) and Greenland ice cores and how they can be used to constrain past climate variations.

• Understand the difference between the longer-period "orbitally-driven" climate variations and the shorter-period "millennial-scale" climate variations.

Link to detailed lecture notes